


Anamnesis or Old Love

by Einn Holten (shadowprincess543)



Category: The Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 16:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18123629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowprincess543/pseuds/Einn%20Holten
Summary: Inspired by https://womantryingtoexist.tumblr.com/post/182421528033/so-we-all-know-and-love-the-headcanon-that-will-isWhile adjusting to life as James Carstairs again after being Brother Zachariah, Jem learns that there is an Academic Discussion and Fanfiction community devoted to his relationship with Will Herondale.





	Anamnesis or Old Love

**Author's Note:**

> Anamnesis: noun, 1. the recollection or remembrance of the past; reminiscence;  
> 2\. Platonism. recollection of the Ideas, which the soul had known in a previous existence, especially by means of reasoning;  
> 3\. a prayer in a Eucharistic service, recalling the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ.

 

          James Carstairs wanted to make it clear that he did not have sex with William Herondale. Nor did he want to. Sure he’d thought about it, but that was just what you did when you were that close to someone: you thought about having sex with them.

 

          The second year students at the Shadowhunter Academy were writing research papers that semester. Magnus, who was teaching the class after the original professor quit, had given out a list of topics. First the students chose a topic they wanted, then made an argument, then supported it with fact-based evidence. They were mostly boring things like Jonathan Shadowhunter, the immediate aftereffects of the Accords, etc. One paper, however, had been sent immediately to Tessa.

          The topic, in theory, was “Read through the Silent Brothers’ Case Files and find an abnormal case. Write about it. Suggestion: William Herondale. Research Secondary Sources.” As Brother Zachariah, Jem had been summoned enough times to the London Institute for there to be an entire cabinet devoted to Will’s claims and the phony records of how he’d been treated.

          The secondary sources were others’ research papers on the subject, primarily in reference to Katherine Hightower’s paper from 1968, which gave a detailed response in support of the  argument that William and Brother Zachariah had been lovers. Later in the 1970s, Alejandro Rosales had written a further detailed paper about their “forbidden love.” From then until the Academy closed, someone wrote one annually.

          Katherine and Alejandro ran seminars to this day.

          “What are you reading?” He had asked Tessa in the fall of 2009, the first time he’d seen her reading one. She had laughed and handed it to him.

          She took him to a seminar that summer, where Katherine and Alejandro greeted her like an old friend. “Tessa Gray! And you’ve brought a guest.”

          “My husband.”

          “Jem Carstairs,” he introduced himself.

          So he sat through a three-hour seminar and the following two-hour panel, all of which was intended to teach him, first, that he was gay and, second, that his parabatai had been his boyfriend. Overall, it was a decent afternoon.

          “How do they not know I’m Brother Zachariah?” Jem asked his wife.

          Tessa shrugged. “I think any records on who became which Silent Brother are sealed. Even after you were cured, it’s probably not common knowledge.” Tessa struggled to suppress her laughter. “I’ve actually been really interested in the effects of leaking that you were parabatai.”

          Jem nodded. “Do they know you’re you?”

          Tessa shuddered. “Absolutely not.”

 

          They went back the next year. He actually participated in the 2011 seminar, asking questions, laughing quietly at the answers and rambled theories he received in response. They went for dinner after with Katherine and Alejandro.

          “So tell me Jem, what do you think of all this?” Katherine asked.

          “Honestly, I think it’s hilarious. The idea is intriguing, and I respect the attempt to represent LGBT individuals in Shadowhunter history, but Silent Brothers don’t have affairs. They don’t have romantic or sexual feelings.”

          Tessa snorted into her glass.

          “That’s true,” Alejandro admitted. “But there’s no evidence that it’s not possible. Also residual feelings left over from their previous lives as a Shadowhunter aren’t guaranteed to fade.” He continued to name theories.

          Jem watched him over his pasta. He twirled his fork about the bowl to hide his amusement. Some of the theories had substance, but for others it took more effort to not laugh.

          He wondered what compelled him to not tell them who he was. Maybe it wasn’t his place? Alejandro and Katherine had built a community out of his story. His and Will’s story. He had devoted his life as a Silent Brother to remembering Will—even named himself Zachariah, meaning remember, for Will. He had carved Will’s initials into his staff. And here was a different side of Will preserved in these people.

          “Oh you’ve got to read the Fanfiction about this,” Katherine added.

          “The what?” Jem asked. Tessa turned the color of a just-ripe raspberry and choked on her wine.

          “The Fanfiction,” Katherine repeated. “Your wife wrote some stellar ones in the 70s. I swear she has copies of the case files hidden somewhere.”

          Tessa, still blushing, tapped her temple. “Just in here.”

          “You didn’t even go to the Academy!” Alejandro protested. “How did you even know about Silent Brothers’ case files?”

          Tessa mumbled something incoherent.

          “What was that?” Jem asked, grinning because he already knew.

          “It’s a hobby,” she repeated with the grace and confidence of a lion. “I like to spend my free time thinking about William Herondale.”

          Jem knew he was the only one who picked up on the distant look in Tessa’s eyes and the slightest quiver in her voice. That her hand moved from her glass to fiddle with the pearl bracelet she wore everyday. He wasn’t the only one who’d devoted their life to Will.

 

          When they were done with dinner, Tessa hugged Katherine and Alejandro and they all bid their farewells until next year. Jem was lost in a sea of memories.

          In one world, he walked back to the hotel hand in hand with Tessa. In another, he followed Will through a different city, hiding how heavily he leaned on his cane so Will wouldn’t worry or turn back. Visions faded in and out. He ran through yet another, re-dreaming a dream-vision he and Will had shared decades ago. He stood in the sitting room of the Institute while Lucie wrestled a spoon out of her brother’s hand. He sat in a grubby pub waiting for Tessa and Cecily to come back from their mission while Will slept, curled in his robes, head rested on his shoulder. He stood back in the crowd watching the tears well in Will’s eyes as his gold-donned son promised his life to a different Carstairs. He sat in a bed with Tessa and Will as Will drew his last breaths. He was twelve years old, staring into blue eyes he could lose himself in as asked another lost boy to be his friend.

          He walked down the street with Tessa, feeling her bracelet brush against his wrist. She was there, and he was there with her. Now, in this moment.

 

          That night, Jem woke in a cold sweat. He patted Tessa’s arm until she rolled over and opened her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

          “Was I in love with Will?”

          Tessa stared at him. “Is that why you woke me up? So I can tell you if you were in love with Will.”

          “Seriously, I mean, I know I love him and I loved him, but was I _in love_ with him?”

          Tessa gave him an amused look then flopped her head back down on the pillow. “I can’t make that decision for you. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She pulled him down and snuggled into his side. He settled in against her and fell back to sleep.

 

The issue remained the next morning. It crowded his thoughts as he threw together a haphazard breakfast. It stayed with him when he kissed his wife standing next to a map of the world. “Where to next?”

“Venice,” she decided.

Jem couldn’t help but draw a comparison to the city slowly sinking beneath the sea. It was here now, but in a few decades, it would be gone. And so would he.

 

          “I want to read some of it.”

          “Oh no,” Tessa insisted. “You are never reading any of my Fanfiction.”

          They stood on a boat anchored off the coast of Maine listening to whale songs. Tessa had Jem’s scarf wrapped around her neck to keep her from shivering in the crisp ocean air. He could feel the little bit of magic she’d used to heat his coat to keep him warm.

          “Why not? I am a main character,” he argued.

          “I’ll let you read Magnus’s.” Tessa had a pair of binoculars to her eyes, focused on a surface ripple in the distance.

          “Magnus wrote Fanfiction about me?”

          She dropped the binoculars away from her face so she could look at him. “On second thought, you shouldn’t read Magnus’s. It’s very explicit.”

          “Oh, well now I have to read it.”

          “No, they’re all terribly arduous to get through. He goes on tangents and has awful ways of describing things.”

          “Let me guess, Magnus spends half the time talking about how Will’s eyes look like the night sky on a full moon or the ocean before a storm.”

          “And his hair is the color of raven’s feathers and the ink on the pages of all the books he’s read.” She paused letting her laughter fade. “Do you remember, when we were young, Sophie wove my hair with flowers the exact shade of his eyes?”

          He didn’t think she wanted him to answer.

          “I never asked her what they were. I still don’t know.”

          They were silent for another minute.

          “Sometimes, when I miss him, I walk through flower shops and greenhouses.” She paused after each sentence. “I’ve looked everywhere for those flowers. I’ve never found them.” She was rambling now “I don’t know if it’s because they’re rare or because I’ve forgotten the exact shade of his eyes, but that they were the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and flowers just can’t compare to them.”

          He just slipped his hand in hers.

 

          Jem cringed at every other word he read as he sat at Magnus and Alec’s kitchen table. Scattered papers crowded the table from the center to the corners. “You’re all lucky I can’t read this out loud,” he announced to the room.

          “That bad?” Alec asked. He held his son Max in his arms. The blue boy watched Jem while he fiddled with a loose thread on Alec’s shirt.

          “At least this one’s not about my ‘magic healing—’” Jem glanced at the kid. “You know.”

          “That one’s funny,” Tessa remarked from next to him at the table. She was reading through the set of Magnus’s works herself. She asked Magnus, “did you bring out ‘Saving a Dying Light?’”

          “It’s somewhere in there.”

          Max wriggled in Alec’s arms. He set him down and the toddler immediately began to waddle across the kitchen. “A-tee Tess.” She picked him up and settled him on her lap.

          “Your Papa’s a writer. Did you know that Max?”

          The boy shook his bright blue head. “No. He not.” Magnus let a look of mock-offense creep onto his face. Alec tapped his arm in comfort.

          Tessa flashed Magnus a fox’s grin. “Maybe he’ll let you read some in twenty years,” she said while she patted Max’s hair.  

          “Thirty,” Magnus corrected.

          “I have a question,” Jem interrupted. He was still skimming through the typed stories. “Why don’t any of these Fanfictions involve Will’s _wife_?”

          “Because you’re both prettier than me.” Tessa didn’t miss a beat in her reply.

          “You’re my OT3,” Magnus said.

          “I don’t know what that means.”

          “It also didn’t answer his question. Come on Magnus, why won’t you write Fanfiction about me?”

          “Anything for your happiness, Tessa. My next one will be the Will Herondale x Tessa Herondale x Brother Zachariah threesome.”

          “Really,” Alec chided. “In front of our child.” Tessa covered Max’s ears.

 

          Jem dreamed about a river. He stood on one bank, looking across to the other side. Very little was discernible because of the thick, rolling fog. It roiled and covered the far bank, but it stopped just as it reached the water. He peered closer, trying to discern the view through the fog.

          Will sat on the edge of a rock, dipping his feet in the river. This wasn’t Will as an old man, as he’d been when he died. This wasn’t Will as a young man, the Will as he’d been when they met Tessa, when Jem joined the Silent Brothers. This was the Will he’d met first, the closed-off boy who finally had a friend.

          He looked up as Jem’s eyes landed on him. He smiled and shook his head. Without a word, he stood up and hopped to another small rock at the river’s center. Jem moved to join him, but Will shook his head again.

          “Will,” Jem said. “Where are we?”

          Will didn’t answer, he just smiled and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. _Go back, go back_ , he seemed to say. _Go back, this isn’t yet the time_.

          Will was right. This wasn’t the time. They had decades before Jem would cross the river or he turned on the wheel or ascended to Heaven. He would join Will there one day, in whatever came thereafter, but not today. He still had today.

 

          “Did you ever read any of Will’s writing?” Tessa asked one day as they sat for dinner in a restaurant near the Seine. It was one of their favorites, and they returned to it whenever the mood struck.

          Tessa had always loved Paris. She and Will had gone there on vacation because of their love of Dickens’ _A Tale of Two Cities_. Jem remembered Tessa telling him a story about Will making a fool of himself by yelling quotes from the book while they walked down the street. She’d come back after he died, and Paris was where Magnus had found her, brokenhearted and petrified at the realization that she had to face a future without Will.

          “I’ve only read the demon pox book.” He laughed, “and some of the exceptionally awful poetry.”

          Tessa set down her fork. “Yes but I meant his journals.”

          “Will kept journals?” he asked. Will had never mentioned them. Neither had Tessa or anyone else.

          “He didn’t share them. Before he died, he gave me permission to read them. It was one of the things Magnus finally convinced me to do here in Paris to help recover.”

          “You never told me about them.”

          “Honestly I forgot,” she admitted. Her words had a mournful sadness to them, as if the very act of speaking them hurt her. “I haven’t thought about them for a long time. All this Will talk lately reminded me.”  

          Jem knew the feeling. Will had been all he’d thought of lately. Will’s eyes, Will’s laugh, Will’s stupid face that had lost the ability to hide any expression at all as he aged. “You don’t think he’d mind me reading them?”

          Tessa gave him a look. “He loved you, Jem. You could read the entire contents of Will’s heart and soul and he’d thank you for being his friend.”

          He knew she was right. “I think I’d like to read them. Are they still in Paris?”

          She shook her head. “No I brought them with me when I returned to London.”

          “Still, I’d like to read them.”

          “They’re at the flat, buried in a box somewhere. I’ll dig them out when we go this winter.” The sadness hadn’t left her face when she started laughing. “That poetry really was awful wasn’t it?”

          “Oh, it was.”

 

          Jem sat in a small room at the flat in London. He had a journal open on his lap and the rest in a stack on his right. Tessa had left him alone to read. He hadn’t asked her to stay or go, but she had kissed him and left anyway.

          There were a lot of things about Will that Jem hadn’t realized he’d forgotten. He hated himself for the failures of time and human memory.

          Will’s poetry had been terrible, but when he wasn’t trying, his words flowed like wine. Reading them again after so long relieved a pressure that weighed down his chest. Every breath was easier than the last. Every beat of his heart seemed easier.

          There were some moments that made him laugh.

_“Jem_ ,” Will wrote, “ _was here today. I summoned him to heal my broken arm. Gabriel kept telling me to use an iratze, but I swear on the Angel the bone was shattered.”_

          There were others he needed to close the journal after he read.

_“We brought the children to visit my parents today. Cecily loves these trips every year. They were her idea. For me, I think it’s harder to see them once a year than to never see them at all._

_“I’ve always abbreviated what I told them about my life, especially when it came to Jem and all of that, but my father saw my Parabatai rune today. I couldn’t lie to him about all that had happened. He knew I had a parabatai, and I named my son after him, but I told him everything about the yin fen and the Silent Brothers. I have only ever seen this pain on my father’s face when Ella died._

_“Am I like him? Does the pain of those around me show on my face and twist its way to haunt my soul? If I didn’t have Jem and Tessa, Jamie and Lucie, the Institute, would I be him? Was I him when I thought I was cursed? If I hadn’t gone to Magnus and found that demon, would I have lost myself the way he did?”_

          Sometimes, there were no words for the emotions he felt.

_“Jem, this entry is for you. I know I’m getting sick, and I don’t think I’m going to recover this time, no matter how often I summon you. I might have months; I might have years._

_“I’m not afraid of what’s to come. I know I’ve told you this before, but here it is again. I believe that there is a river that separates the living from the dead. When I die, I will wait on its shores for you, decades, centuries, millennia, however long it takes._

_“I hope you find your cure, the one we all thought was impossible. If anyone deserves a second chance at life, it’s you. I hope you spend that life with Tessa. She still wears your mother’s necklace, the jade you gave her as an engagement gift. She wears it every day. She loves you Jem, and I love you._

_“‘Entreat me not to leave thee, or return from following after thee—For whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Angel do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.’_

_“I think they should change it, the last line of that vow. For not even death will part thee and me. I will be a whisper in your ear, a dark spot at the corner of your eye, a hand resting on your shoulder. I will be with you until the sun dies, until the end of time._

_“I love you James Carstairs. I have loved you since we were twelve years old and I realized I didn’t have to be alone, at least for a short time. I couldn’t kill you if you were already dying, so I allowed myself to love you, made you my saving grace._

_“Thank you for everything you did for me. I don’t know how long after my death you’ll read this, but I don’t want you to mourn me. Publically yes, please wail with tears at the mention of my name. Celebrate me and my life. That’s all I ask. Let that be your last sacrifice._

_“I love you. Will.”_

          He read through the day and into the night, until well after the sun had set. He hardly noticed until the light had dimmed enough that he was forced to turn on a lamp. When he finally flipped the last page, he closed the book and placed it on the stack to his left. He stared at the wall until he couldn’t take it and knocked the lamp off the side table.

          Jem sat alone in the dark and cried.

 

          The Silent Brothers had explained in clinical terms that it had been the Parabatai Curse that had saved his life. He’d been given two years to live. It had been five years later when he finally lost his battle with yin fen. Now, more than 130 years after he was supposed to die, he knew it was love that had saved him.

          Will had thought he would kill anyone he loved, but still he poured every ounce of love he had into Jem. What was supposed to kill him had saved his life, and Will had never known it.

          It had been at Blackfriars Bridge where Jem had realized he was in love with Tessa, where they had had their annual meeting, where they reunited, and where they were married. They didn’t have to return to Blackfriars Bridge every year, but they did anyway. They would walk across the bridge and spend a night or a weekend in the flat. The one signed to Tessa Herondale Carstairs.

          They were standing on the bridge, looking out over the Thames when Jem turned to his wife. “I was in love with Will,” he said.

          “I know.”

          “You did?” He stared at her in surprise. “Since when?”

          She let out a bell-ringing laugh. “Everyone knew but you. James once called you our ‘mutual boyfriend.’”

          It was Jem’s turn to laugh. “In my defense, I was a Silent Brother.”

          “That hasn’t stopped generations of Academy students.”

          They were silent for a time, watching the river and the people on the banks, letting traffic pass behind them. It was Tessa who finally broke it. “You told me once about the love between the three of us. You, Will, and I.”

          “Have I mentioned I am an idiot?”

          She nudged him playfully in response. “Love is love, regardless of what kind. You knew you loved him even if you hadn’t yet realized what kind of love you felt, and Will knew that too. I can’t say if Will ever knew how he loved you besides I know he was in love with you.

          “I don’t believe that love is something finite, that it can only be given once. Or that it has to be taken back before you can give again. I love you and I love Will. Will loved you and he loved me.”

          “And I love you and Will.”

          She nodded. “It’s not a matter of how you loved or who loved who more. It’s love in the simplest of terms. The sun rises in the east. We all loved each other. The sun sets in the west. And it isn’t a love that’s going to fade over time.”

          The lights of London were starting to flicker on. Jem and Tessa walked toward them. The river reflected the sky, bathing them in an aura of pink and orange.

          Tessa had seen Will’s ghost at their wedding on this bridge years ago. She saw him sometimes at important events and milestones. Jem had known he was there too, though he couldn’t see him. Will was always there in one form or another. A wisp of smoke, a shiver, the feeling of waking up warm and comfortable. A flicker of feeling in a faded rune placed just above the heart.

          Jem squeezed Tessa’s hand, and he felt that flicker.

 


End file.
